Open Office Or Private Space? What If We Told You That You Could Have Both? A typical new office space might try to mimic elements of home, with couches, full kitchens, and even beds. The unstated goal is often to get employees to stick around for longer hours. At the same time, it's more and more common for people to take work home with them, and answer work emails in the middle of the night. The division between work and home continues to disappear. A new conceptual design for the workplace of the future, the winner in this year's RSA Student Design Awards. takes the opposite approach. In this office, work is clearly work, and as someone moves through the space, each area is also clearly designed to support a different type of work. "The space naturally suggests the kind of work that could happen in each zone," says Dublin-based industrial design student James Donnellan, who created the conceptual design with Kevin Glynn as part of the design awards.
The office is deliberately spread over two floors. The New Habit Challenge: Work The Exact Amount Of Time Science Tells Us To. It turns out going hard for eight hours straight every day isn't the best way to get work done. Contrary to the popular convention of working ourselves to exhaustion, researchers from the University of Toronto found that taking regular breaks actually makes you more productive. This is because, according to the study's co-author John Trougakos, once our physical energy is depleted, so too is our pool of psychological energy. Essentially, if we're working ourselves to the point of physical exhaustion, we're not going to get superior work performance and focus in return. So is there a prescribed amount of time we should allow ourselves to relax and reenergize? According to researchers from social networking company Draugiem Group, there is--and it's very specific.
For the utmost productivity you can squeeze out of yourself, researchers say you should work for 52 minutes at a time and take 17-minute breaks in between. Get The Best Stories In Leadership Every Day. Commune With Nature In These 6 Productivity-Boosting Offices. We spend a third of our day, at least, in offices that aren't always conducive to productivity and mental health--some are even actively hurting us.
At a basic level, being outside, surrounded by nature, is good for us; even just having some plants around can improve morale and, in turn, productivity. Studies have also shown that natural light can help elevate productivity. So why not combine them? Here are eight offices that blur the divide between the indoors and outdoors, making a day at work feel like a walk in the park (well, almost). 1. This cabin-like office houses Invisible Studio, a British architecture studio. 2. Looking almost like a glass-fronted long subway car, this office was built by and for the Spanish architecture firm Selgas Cano. 3.
Pod Space, located in the U.K., creates a variety of different small enclosed buildings. 4. 5. 6. The G-Pod, created by British gardening specialists Ornate Garden, is a sphere. How Everyday Ergonomics Shape Your Behavior. One of Darwin's greatest insights came at the end of his 1872 work, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. "The free expression by outward signs of an emotion intensifies it," he wrote. Darwin simply meant that emotion and expression cut both ways: you can thrust out your chest because you feel proud, or you can feel proud because you thrust out your chest. Modern science has confirmed the wisdom of this perception time and again. People feel happier when their facial muscles are positioned into a smile.
And they feel sadder when they're made to hunch over. Recently, M.I.T. management scholar Andy J. "We don't need to stand like Superman or Wonder Woman to actually feel powerful," Yap tells Co.Design. Yap and two other researchers tested this idea in a series of experiments published online last month in the journal Psychological Science. In one of the experiments, Yap's team asked study participants to sit at a desk and complete an anagram test. The Creative Case For Stuff. Rick Barrack, the chief creative officer at the branding firm CBX and the man responsible for Duane Reade's successful redesign, believes that a life lived entirely through a screen is one that's probably short on genuine creative output.
Which is why at CBX, it's all about the tactile. The objects around his team, Barrack says, help them dream up new directions and identities for their clients' products. CBX's office, he says, is "built around the spirit of theatrics" that has gone as far as filling a room full of sand to re-create the feel of a beach. Here, he shares his creative case for stuff. This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity. Stuff Is The Stuff Of Inspiration "One of the areas that we find really important, particularly in this day and age of the computer and social media and such, we find it necessary and critical to get back to our roots. Really Live The Brand "I think living the brand is really important and you can live the brand in many ways.